Three travelogues have whiled away this monsoon. The best has been Ma Jian&rsquos Red Dust, just the ticket as the house next door is knocked down. The travels it chronicles are thirty years gone, but the dust rises up afresh because Ma Jian&rsquos road was often actually walked. Three years&rsquo adventures could pall in the telling but the narrative is supple and sure shifts of tense, much talk, and a painter&rsquos eye make the matter live. The damp socks dangling from his pack stink, the beer bottle he brings down on a thief&rsquos head hurts. And political danger helps no tang, and no goad, like tyranny. WH Hudson&rsquos The Purple Land and Kerouac&rsquos On the Road, which sandwiched Red Dust on my bedside table this past month, suffered by comparison the one Victorian and orotund and lying, the other truthful but flatulent. Ma Jian&rsquos book lacks the swagger and spate of both. (Is there something to envy in the natural compression of Chinese characters) The book is so crisply rendered by his English wife you wonder if anything was gained in translation.

Brick dust creeps through the holes in the black tarp as I read, but it could be Gobi Desert sand.

What sledgehammers

Irwin Allan Sealy is an award-winning writer whose latest book is The Small Wild Goose Pagoda An Almanack